The Moz Q&A Community

Hey friend! Have fun exploring Q&A, but in order to ask your own
questions, comment, or give thumbs up, you need to be logged in to your
Moz Pro account.
You can also earn access by receiving 500
MozPoints
from participating in YouMoz and the Moz Blog!

Transferring to New URL Structure - 301 existing ones?

We are contemplating changing our 8 year old procedural PHPwebsites over to a new OOP structure. By doing so, a lot of changes are goingto happen. We are worried about our internal pages, in terms of 301 redirectingthem to our proposed new ones.

For example,

Our old page would be /mattress_double.php

Where the new one would be similar to /mattress/double

If we were to redirect all of our important pages, we would haveover 200 301 redirects. Is this too much?

I will say that you should worry about traffic and not PageRank with the change you intend to make.

If you implement the 301 redirect correctly from old URLs to new, you should be on the same traffic levels within a month (maximum) after this change. However, the double check if the redirect are working properly from the time of switch.

There is no limit to number of 301 redirect that you can add however, avoid and chain redirect like

Page A >> Page B >> Page C

Only issue that you might face is increased server latency with so many redirects in the htaccass (if you are using this method to redirect) as for every request this file will be scanned for a possible redirect. An alternate can be that you keep the old pages on the site and do a php script 301 redirect at page level which will be time taking as you might have to manually update the code of each page. Note that the script should be at the very beginning of the page so Google crawls it first and moves on. With this method you can ensure that page speed is not affected for the pages where no redirects are added.

There isn't really a limit on the number of 301 redirects that you can have. Google will not punish you at all for having these in place. If you run on a CMS like Joomla!, the best thing to do is to get a plugin that can automate all of the 301 redirects (this will save time and will make sure you don't miss anything).

The pages shouldn't loose any authority in terms of PageRank, however, you may see you movement in the SERP listings (most likely in a positive way) due to the new URL syntax.

If you need to update your technology, you need to. Yes, there is some lose of "link juice" through a 301 redirect. I can't give you a precise number, but most SEOs believe a 301 tranfers about 80% of it's link juice.

With this in mind, it's important to build new links after a large URL structural change, and make sure your internal link architecture is solid.

One piece of advice. I would make sure to maintain 2 xml sitemaps. One containing the old URLs, and the second containing the new URLs. Submit both to Google via Webmaster Tools. This way, Google will still try to crawl the old URLs and process the 301, dropping the old page from the index faster. Without this step, Google may keep both pages in its index and ding you for duplicate content.

Something we have done a number of times although all were on one xml - but same deal. Only kill the old URLs from the xml sitemap once you see they have been processed and you see the change in indexed pages (site:domain.com). Again, in most cases this took several months as far as a process though.

Wow.
"Yes, there is some lose of "link juice" through a 301 redirect. I can't give you a precise number, but most SEOs believe it's about 80%." I had no idea it was that much.
I have also never heard of having two sitemaps, for old and new urls. Glad I ran one BEFORE making massic 301 changes to site structure today! Will throw the new one to Google but keep the old one.
Thanks for the tip!

Hey friend! Have fun exploring Q&A, but in order to ask your own
questions, comment, or give thumbs up, you need to be logged in to your
Moz Pro account.
You can also earn access by receiving 500
MozPoints
from participating in YouMoz and the Moz Blog!
Learn more.